I want to love Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6. I like most of it, but I feel like I’m bashing it Flexible window experience just as much as I praise anything else. For some reason, Samsung doesn’t seem interested in making its cover screen experience as smooth or intuitive as the Motorola Razr Plus (2024). But every time Samsung fails, a third-party developer is ready to step in and push the Galaxy Z Flip series to reach its potential. This time, it’s CoverScreen OS with an obvious update: applications that automatically run on the Flex window.

At first, I wasn’t sure why I should care about apps that run on a nearly square screen. After all, there’s nothing the Galaxy Z Flip 6 should be able to tell me in landscape orientation that it couldn’t tell me in portrait mode, right? Well, that’s mostly true until you open Spotify. You see, if you’ve ever scrolled up to a song in the Spotify app, you’ll know that it appears with more content from the artist you’re listening to, along with the lyrics of the song currently playing and upcoming tour stops. . This is all useful information, especially if you want to support a new artist that appeared on a playlist, but there’s one problem: none of this works on the Flex window.

That hasn’t been the case until now, at least. With the latest CoverScreen OS update, as soon as you switch your Flip from portrait to landscape orientation, it switches to the full-screen version of Spotify which allows vertical swiping. If you’re like me and constantly checking the lyrics of a song to make sure you heard them correctly, updating makes a big difference. Rather than opening my phone, going to Spotify, and searching for lyrics, I can do everything from the Flex window and have my phone in my pocket about half the time.

Admittedly, I haven’t found much use for auto-rotating apps on Flex Window outside of music streaming services. This also only works in the app version of Spotify – the widget is always locked to its standard portrait orientation. Other apps I’ve tried, like Strava and Instagram, tend to look and act the same whether in landscape or portrait mode, and sometimes rotating causes the bottom edge to move of the Flex window. However, the rotation option adds something significant to the Galaxy Z Flip series, and I wonder why Samsung didn’t do it first.

I often wonder why Samsung treats the Flex Window the way it does. I was willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt when its cover display was a small 1.6-inch panel, but those days are long behind us. Samsung expects a lot from its Flex Window, going so far as to create an AI-powered auto-zoom feature for its cameras, but that makes the omissions all the more puzzling. Every time Samsung does something smart to try to make the best flip phone in the market, it seems to do this while ignoring a simple feature that would make the Flex Window more useful.

Right now, establishing the ideal Flex Window experience requires a balancing act that I’m not sure how to recommend. If you want apps, there are Good lockbut you are stuck with the standard portrait orientation. If you want apps that run, there’s CoverScreen OS, but you have to pay a weekly (or annual) subscription to do anything beyond the basics – which is hard to recommend when the phone already costs $1,100 . Maybe you can get away with a carefully curated set of widgets, but Samsung doesn’t exactly guide you in that area either.

Maybe Samsung needs to bring CoverScreen OS into the fold completely. It should either be part of Good Lock or the default Flex Window experience. Clearly, the focus has been on the smaller parts of the Flex window, and now Samsung should either copy them or give them their due credit.